Cycle

About this model

Many games incorporate resource management mechanics where resources gradually deplete or degrade over time. For example, in a survival game, food and water supplies may spoil or become contaminated if not properly stored or consumed within a specific time frame. This decay cycle compels players to actively manage and replenish resources to sustain their characters or progress in the game.

The diagram represents a simplified gameplay loop from a game similar to Borderlands, focusing on the cycle of shooting and looting for ammunition. It comprises two primary pools: one representing the action of shooting ("Shoot") starting with one unit of ammunition, and another for looting ammunition from the environment ("Loot Ammo"), initially empty. The flow between these pools is bidirectional, signifying that shooting consumes ammunition sending a unit to the "Loot Ammo" pool, from which ammunition must be collected after shooting to replenish the "Shoot" pool, allowing the cycle to continue. This setup encapsulates the essential resource management loop in shooting games where managing ammunition is a critical part of gameplay, capturing the necessity for players to balance offensive actions with the need to resupply.

“Cycle” is a diagram in the Machinations Community by Anıl Akhan.

You can open the original diagram in the Machinations app, press Play to watch how resources move through it, and change its values to see how the system responds. Machinations is a visual tool for designing, simulating and balancing game economies and other systems, where resources flow through sources, pools, drains, converters and gates. In a diagram, a source creates resources, a pool stores them, a drain removes them, a converter changes one resource into another and a gate decides where they go next.